Lately, with all this talk of natural-language-as-programming-language, I've tried reflecting on my own code and seeing how I might convey the same intent, but in English.
It's made me realize that it's usually the rule that intent at least feels easier to convey through code rather than through natural language. This is especially true if I'm trying to perform some complex mathematical task that's geometric in nature. Put another way, it's probably easier to understand how poisson disc sampling works if you saw the code for it, vs if you read the actual paper, especially if the code had comments providing additional context for different blocks of code. Doesn't help that the paper uses complex mathematical terminology, whereas the code, at worst, might have very terse variable names
And yet, I think a better example might be found in markup languages like HTML. Trying to convey the layout of a webpage using ONLY natural language seems really hard compared to using a markup language.
It's made me realize that it's usually the rule that intent at least feels easier to convey through code rather than through natural language. This is especially true if I'm trying to perform some complex mathematical task that's geometric in nature. Put another way, it's probably easier to understand how poisson disc sampling works if you saw the code for it, vs if you read the actual paper, especially if the code had comments providing additional context for different blocks of code. Doesn't help that the paper uses complex mathematical terminology, whereas the code, at worst, might have very terse variable names
And yet, I think a better example might be found in markup languages like HTML. Trying to convey the layout of a webpage using ONLY natural language seems really hard compared to using a markup language.